3,899 (From Part I of Book I of The Golden Path)
(Julie is now on the staff of The Cathedral Shop at the end of our herione’s first week in her new world)
On Friday in the middle of the morning when there were quite a number of Pilgrims happily wandering admiring, a mother with a little boy came in looking wonderingly around at the obviously unfamiliar, then he began to grizle seeing nothing he understood. Julie quietly fazed into her old world of unhappy child so gently took his hand to lead him over to where the big guide books lived sat down to place him on her knee, put an arm round him then picked one off its shelf. Opening the first page, she began, “Once upon a time” – then gently turning the pretty pages of pictures she told him the story of The Cathedral Ellen had told her on her first night.
A couple, slightly impeded in the progress stopped to listen, arrested by the eternal picture of ‘mother & child’ making a tiny pilgrimage. The mother came over with a small collection of wanderers who quietly joined the Fairy-Story, their gaze transfixed by the picture of the two heads bowed over the book above the magnificent oriole of Julie’s huge swirling skirt, in an eternal.
When she had turned the last page she smiled at him, both now joined in a magic circle, “I tell you what, little prince”, she suggested to him, “if you ask your mummy to buy you this then she can read it to you all again when you get home’n tell you all about the wonderful people who’ve lived here and”, she accented giving him a convivial squeeze, “if you’n your mum join me I’ll take you to see the place where they lived”. The little boy stood clutching Julie lost in wonder staring unbelievingly at her – then spotted the little cathedral models standing by the books to compliment them, to stretch out his hand to try to clutch the wonder to him.
For Julie the connection was eternal, a child’s visual assimilation of the obvious, so she picked it up then lead him to the till, with his mother trailing uncertainly behind. Standing behind the till she rang up the book then looked at the price underneath the model to ask, “is that all right”?, to be met with the hesitation she knew so well.
Hadn’t she been there more often than she cared to think – the hell of ‘not enough’ with the big silver bowl at Evensong looking her square in the eye – so she just smiled beatifically then put the model in the bag with the book, which she gave to the little boy who gazed at her speechless one hand round the bag with the other in his mother’s. Julie came out from behind the till, picked up the child’s other hand then lead them – with his mother wonderingly caught in a magic she’d never been to – to start their trip up The Nave. Jennifer (her boss) watched absorbed – gold Ellen had said.
Complete silence filled their passing with Pilgrims, now making little journeys into too infrequently visited lands, drifting up to the till. “Who is she”?, asked one, voicing the question of all who had been witness, “I haven’t seen anything so beautiful for ages, they looked like a medieval painting” – “yes there was an eternal magic there”, entered another enthusiastically. Jennifer who had been a witness to the whole replied, “Julie started with me on permanent basis on Monday – a shaft of light has come amongst us”, then she smiled, “you aren’t tourists any more because Julie saw you coming down the sunbeams from the windows, so now you’re Pilgrims like all those who’ve come here since our Cathedral was built”. “Oh my”, voiced another still carrying the picture in his head, “pilgrims, well, yes I suppose we are, I like it – we’ve come to the shrine and we’ve seen the best miracle of all – a child captured by a story” – “told by a beautiful princess”, mooted an elderly woman who was still visibly in fairy-land.
